Buddhism, Taoism, Stoicism... Meism

I grew up in rural Australia in the 1970's and 80's. If you wanted religion back then, Christianity was the buffet and it was all you can eat.

There wasn't a menu.

There wasn't a choice.

There was church on Sundays, hymns you didn't feel, and a version of God who seemed more interested in what you weren't allowed to do than who you actually were.

I never bought it.

Not dramatically. I didn't storm out of a service or get into screaming matches with the local priest. It just never took. The whole thing felt external, like someone handed me a uniform that didn't fit and told me to wear it anyway. By the time I was old enough to put words to it, I considered myself a staunch atheist. That felt honest. It felt like the only intellectually respectable position for someone who wasn't going to pretend.

And to be fair, it worked for a while. Atheism is a clean position. It doesn't ask much of you except to not believe in things. How fucking easy. But somewhere in my late twenties, I started feeling a kind of low-grade dissatisfaction that I couldn't properly name. It wasn't a crisis. It wasn't some dramatic dark night of the soul. It was more like a quiet, persistent question that atheism didn't have a good answer for.

What do you do with this fucking voice in your head?

Not what do you believe about the universe. Not whether there's a god or an afterlife. What do you actually do, day to day, when your head is a mess and you can't seem to get out of your own way? Atheism was clear on what it rejected. It was less helpful on what to do with the hours between waking up and falling asleep.

So I started reading.

The first book I picked up was The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama. I don't remember why that one specifically. Maybe someone recommended it. Maybe the cover caught my eye. Whatever the reason, I opened it with the same scepticism I brought to everything. Religious leader. Fancy robes. Probably about to tell me how to live my life.

And then I hit a passage that stopped me cold.

The Dalai Lama said, essentially: don't believe anything I say. Find out for yourself.

Fucking what!?

I had to read it twice.

The closest thing Buddhism has to a Pope was telling me not to take his word for it. He was saying: here are some ideas. Try them. See if they work. If they don't, throw them out.

Compare that to what I grew up with. Christianity, at least the version I was handed, made belief the entry fee. You had to accept the whole package before you were allowed through the door. Faith came first. Understanding, if it came at all, came later. Questioning wasn't encouraged. It was tolerated at best.

Here was a man in robes telling me the opposite. Don't believe me. Investigate. Your own experience is the authority. Your own mind is the laboratory.

That one line changed the entire direction of my life.

What followed was years of reading, exploring, and gradually coming to understand something that now seems obvious but absolutely wasn't at the time: there's a whole category of wisdom traditions that have nothing to do with worship.

Buddhism, Taoism, Stoicism.

These aren't religions in the way I understood religion growing up. They don't ask you to believe in a deity. They don't promise you an afterlife if you behave. They don't have a rulebook handed down from on high with eternal consequences for getting it wrong (look the fuck out... I hope you like it hot!)

They're internal technologies. Operating systems for your own mind.

Let me lay out the basics, not as a scholar but as someone who found them useful.

Buddhism, at its core, says your suffering comes from two places: attachment to things you can't keep, and aversion to things you can't avoid. You want what you don't have. You're terrified of losing what you do have. You spend your life ricocheting between craving and fear, and that ricochet is what wears you down. The solution isn't prayer. It's not divine intervention. It's learning to see your own mind clearly enough to stop being yanked around by it. No gods required.

Taoism says something similar from a different angle. Stop forcing. The river is already flowing where it needs to go. Your job isn't to redirect the river. Your job is to stop standing in it, fists clenched, demanding that the current move uphill. The Tao Te Ching is full of paradoxes and strange images because it's trying to bypass the part of your brain that wants everything to be a formula. It's pointing at something simpler: life has a rhythm. You can fight it, or you can learn to move with it.

Stoicism comes from ancient Greece and Rome, a completely different world, and somehow arrives at remarkably similar ground. Epictetus opens his handbook with a distinction that sounds almost too simple: some things are up to us, and some things are not. Your judgements. Your choices. Your intentions. They are yours. Other people's opinions. The weather. Your reputation. The timing of loss. Those are not. Most of what tortures you falls into the second category.

Here's what struck me as I kept reading. These three traditions, separated by centuries and continents, were all pointing at the same thing. They use different language. Buddhism talks about attachment. Taoism talks about forcing. Stoicism talks about control. But peel back the vocabulary and they're all describing the same basic human problem.

You suffer because you keep trying to control things you can't control. You suffer because you resist what's already happening. You suffer because you think peace is something that arrives when the world finally matches your preferences.

None of them ask you to take this on faith. All of them say, essentially... try it. Pay attention. See if it's true.

This was the polar opposite of what I grew up with. Western religion, at least my experience of it, is built on external authority. External rules. External salvation. There's a God out there who made you, who judges you, who you need to please. The answers come from outside. You are small, and your job is to obey.

Eastern philosophy, the way I came to understand it, flips the whole thing inward.

The answers aren't out there. They're in here. Your mind is the project. Your experience is the evidence. No one's going to save you, and that's not bad news. It's the starting point for actually doing something useful.

This is where it gets personal.

I'm a butcher by trade. Thirty-five years of early mornings, sharp knives, and a front-row seat to human nature. And here I was, finding genuine wisdom in a philosophy that says compassion is the highest virtue and all life deserves respect. A philosophy that says killing is kind of the opposite of the whole project.

That's not a small contradiction. That's the kind of thing that sits in your gut if you're actually taking the ideas seriously. For years I couldn't bring myself to call myself a Buddhist. It felt hypocritical. It felt like wearing a uniform I hadn't earned. I could align with the philosophy. I could use the tools. But the label felt dishonest.

I never really resolved it. I just learned to live with the tension. And then, with fuck-all warning, life decided to resolve it for me.

A spinal injury ended my career. Work disappeared. My partner died. I found myself homeless. All of it, one thing after the other, like someone was running through a checklist of everything that could possibly go wrong and making sure they didn't miss an item.

The kind of seasons that doesn't feel like character development. They feel like survival mode.

This is where philosophy stops being interesting ideas you read about in books and becomes something you either use or you don't. You can talk about impermanence when things are going fine. It's a nice concept. Everything changes, how fucking profound. But when everything actually changes, when the life you had gets dismantled piece by piece, that's when you find out whether any of it actually stuck.

I'm not going to tell you I handled it gracefully. I didn't. There were days I couldn't get out of bed. Days I was bitterly fucking angry at everything. Days the whole Buddhist-adjacent-butcher routine felt like a sick joke I'd played on myself.

But here's what I can tell you: the tools held.

The Buddhist idea that suffering comes from fighting reality? I lived that. Every moment I spent wishing things were different was a moment I made myself more miserable. The moment I just let things be what they were, as awful as they were, were the moments I could breath.

The Stoic insistence that the only thing you control is your response? That stopped being abstract philosophy and became a daily survival tactic. I couldn't control that my body was broken. I couldn't control that my partner was gone, I couldn't control that I didn't have a roof. But I could control whether I got up. Whether I ate. Whether I treated the next person I encountered like a human being or an outlet for my pain.

The Taoist idea of not forcing? That one was the hardest. Everything in me wanted to fight. To push. To make something happen. And none of that was going to work. Sometimes the only thing you can do is stop thrashing and let the current carry you until you find something to hold onto.

All three philosophies, slightly different versions of the same outcome. And all of them got tested in a way I never asked for and sure as shit didn't want.

When I eventually started writing about all of this, I called the blog The Buddhist Butcher. It was tongue in cheek. It still is. The contradiction is the point. I'm not a monk. I'm definitely not fucking enlightened. I still swear too much and laugh at shit I probably shouldn't. I'm more comfortable saying I align with Buddhist philosophy than calling myself a Buddhist. The label still feels like a uniform I haven't quite earned.

And you know what? That's fine. That might actually be the most important thing I've figured out.

You don't have to join a team.

You don't have to become a Buddhist. Or a Taoist. Or a Stoic. You don't have to pick one and wear it like an identity and defend it against the others. These traditions aren't competing religions. They're toolboxes, built in different parts of the world by different people who were all trying to solve the same problem...

... how to be human without being crushed by it.

Take what works. Leave what doesn't. Build something that fits the shape of your actual life, and who you want to be. Not the shape of a doctrine.

I've taken the Buddhist emphasis on compassion and the nature of suffering. I've taken the Stoic discipline of separating what's mine from what's isn't. I've taken the Taoist reminder to stop forcing things that aren't meant to be forced. None of them contradict each other in practice. They just approach the same destination from different roads.

Call it whatever you want.

I call it Meism.

A personalised operating system, assembled from parts that fit, tested in the kind of circumstances that don't give you the option of fooling yourself.

I'm not writing this from a monastery. I'm not writing it from a place of having figured everything out. I'm writing it from the part of life where the bullshit doesn't survive. Where you either find something that actually helps, or you don't.

The Dalai Lama told me not to believe him. He told me to find out for myself.

I did. Not because I'm special. Not because I'm disciplined. Because I ran out of fucking options, and the door was open.

If you've ever felt like the religion you were handed doesn't fit, or like atheism doesn't answer the questions you're actually asking, or like you're not allowed to take the useful bits of something without swallowing the whole thing...

... the door's open for you too.

You don't need a label. You don't need permission. You just need to pay attention to what actually helps, and be honest about what doesn't.

Start there. The rest figures itself out.

Peace, Love, and Profanities

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